Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.)

There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the page. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

29 June 2010

Jean Planchard worked as an inspector for the Post Office. As Maud Marin, she succeeded in getting her French identity papers changed in 1968, one of the first to do so since the process had been stopped after Coccinelle’s divorce in 1960. She worked as a prostitute before she had surgery in Brussels in 1974 with Dr Michel Seghers.

She qualified as a lawyer in 1980 and has worked on behalf of prostitutes. She was removed from the Paris Bar in 1992, but was admitted to the bar of Seine-Saint-Denis, and also that of Bobigny.

She has written autobiography, and about the legal system that is disinterested in victims.

In 2006 she applied to enter the competition to become a magistrate but Minister of Justice refused to include her years as a postal inspector towards her years of public service.
*Not the Houston veterinarian.

Both the Wikipedia article and that in La Depeche claim that Maud was the first transsexual lawyer in the world. Close but not quite. She qualified in 1980. However Daniel van Oosterwijck had qualified in 1979.

27 June 2010

Nanjo Masami worked as a gei boi (transgender performer) in Osaka clubs in the early 1960s, and became the manager of two clubs while still in her early 20s.

However after an affair with a man who could not accept her penis, she self-castrated herself with a Japanese sword, and almost died.

In the late 1960s, after recovering from this, she moved to the small town of Tendō in Japan’s north-east. She opened a club, Blue Night, which became a tourist attraction in the 1970s. She, and her younger male lover, became well-known in the town, and she became a member of the organizing committee for the town’s annual Cherry Festival, and the star of its associated dramatic performances.

25 June 2010

Adèle was born in Southampton and graduated in drama from Birmingham University. She started transition in 1973 with Dr Randell at Charing Cross Hospital. She worked as a civil servant and as a secretary, and was attempting to become a jazz singer.

In 1984, she auditioned for the all-girl singing group Fascinating Aida, where she impressed with her vocal range. A niggling doubt caused one of the others to actually ask if she were a man, which Adèle denied. However she was accepted into the group.

An old friend of Dillie Keane had known the pre-op Adèle and later on told her, but Dillie and the others sat on the knowledge until a review in the Financial Times of their performance at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1985: “You could have fooled me that the one with the smoky brown voice isn't a man in drag”, which Adèle took badly, and Dillie and the others told her that they knew and that did not make any difference.

But the press had started to sniff out the story: they phoned Adèle’s parents late at night. The group decided that the press had to be told, and supported Adèle before and after she gave an interview. Later Dillie would deflect questions on the topic by claiming that she was the transsexual in the group.

Adèle had a cameo in the film Lady Jane, 1986 , and in Company Business, 1991 playing a Marlene impersonator in a Berlin drag bar, and was special advisor for the transsexual love story Different For Girls, 1996.

Fascinating Aida was retired in 1989, revived in 1994, retired in 2004, revived in 2008. Dillie and Adèle are the only early members still involved, and are still performing 25 years after they met.

Dillie Keane. Fascinating Who? Fascinating Aida: the anatomy of a group on the crest of a ripple. Elm Tree. 1986

Keith Hull’s father spent ten years, including the Second World War hospitalized with what was finally diagnosed as ankylosing spondylitis, and was told that he would never work or even walk again. However when his wife became pregnant with Keith, he did find work, and eventually rose to being a production manager.

They lived in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. When Keith was seven, his parents became Jehovah’s Witnesses. Keith had frequent dreams of being a girl. He was in a group of friends that dressed up which let him do some cross-dressing, and for two years had an arrangement with an adult woman who had him wash her naked body and dressed him as a girl. In teenage he was popular with girls, but preferred a platonic friendship with them. He left school with four O-Levels: his parents felt that further education was pointless as the end of the world was nigh.

At 21 he became a sales representative at Hoover, and fell in love and married Marylin. They had twin boys and then a girl. He was promoted to area manager and then to marketing. He became head of Saga DIY Retail and then sales and marketing director of Hestair Group (now part of Findel PLC) which specialized in educational supplies.

He was a workaholic and his home life deteriorated. Marylin persuaded him to see a doctor who hypnotized him with Marylin present, and she and the doctor decided that he was transsexual. Marylin dressed him in female clothes for the first time since childhood. He encouraged Marylin to take lovers, and became very depressed. He almost committed suicide.

He signed on with a new doctor (actually in the same practice as serial killer Dr Shipman), started on hormones and was referred to Dr Russell Reid at Charing Cross Hospital GIC. He hired a woman to coach him in femininity and deportment. His wife left taking the three children. He chose the name Stephanie Anne as his twin boys were named Stephen and Andrew, and chose Lloyd from his chequebook. At the end of 1983 at the age of 37, Keith left his job and returned early 1984 as Stephanie Anne Lloyd, having had surgery with Peter Philip.

One of the employees sold the story to The Daily Mirror, and Hestair was besieged by reporters. Stephanie was persuaded to resign. She signed over all her assets to Marylin and had left just her clothes and 78p. She quickly found that no company wanted to employ her despite her experience in marketing.

However she soon had two rich men after her, even after she told them of her past. The Elders of the Jehovah’s Witness summoned Keith and disfellowshipped him, which required that Stephanie’s parents regard her as dead.

She decided to open a retail business for transvestites, and advertised in the Manchester Evening News for business partners who would provide capital. The first partner was her femininity coach’s brother, and a second partner was David Booth who owned a chain of supermarkets with his wife.

They found a suitable property on Bury Old Road, Prestwich, Manchester. The business Transformation, opened in October 1984, catering as a beauty salon to women and also to male transvestites. Because the business was not doing so well, Stephanie, with the advice of a solicitor, sold herself as a prostitute in the upstairs flat, until subjected to a full-scale police raid. At the trial in December 1985, Stephanie was given a suspended sentence.

David’s wife divorced him, and David and Stephanie became lovers. They were married in Sri Lanka in 1986 as it was not then legal to do so in the UK. They expanded the business, opening a London Branch just around the corner from Euston Station, and another in Birmingham. They created the Albany Gender identity Clinic which is located across the street from the Prestwich shop. In December 1989, when there was a controversy in that Lancashire County Cricket Club did not permit women members, Stephanie took advantage of the fact that she was technically still male and took out a membership in her male name. Thus she was able to get into the AGM and contributed to women members being accepted.

When Stephanie was ill in hospital, David contacted her parents, and was able to bring them to visit and reconcile them to her. Stephanie published her autobiography in 1991.

Another police raid with an extensive search found that their own-made videos did not have certificates from the British Board of Film Classification. They were fined ₤6,000 and sentenced to a year in prison, which Stephanie served in a women’s open prison near York. She was released on appeal three months later.

They have an adopted child, and raised David’s two children. Two of Stephanie’s children from her first marriage have accepted her.

Together, Stephanie and David have built a chain of six hotels in North Wales, where they also run transvestite getaways.

Following the change of UK law, they re-married in 2006. She has been voted the leader of the Llangollen Chamber of Trade and Tourism. In 2009, she was featured in a four-part documentary on BBC Wales.

20 June 2010

Luisa Matson grew up to become businessman Milton Matson. After 25 years of being Milton, he was arrested in 1895 in the rooms of his fiancée, Helen Fairweather, a school-teacher in Los Gatos, California for endorsing checks made out to Luisa.

He was locked up with several other men in the County Jail in San Jose for two weeks until a telegraph arrived for Luisa Matson. This created confusion and after legal wrangling, the charges were dropped, and he was free to leave, still in male clothing.

While the press was debating whether he would be re-arrested under the local law against cross-dressing, he was offered a position in a local dime museum to exhibit himself in male clothing. He stressed that he found women's clothing so completely uncomfortable. The show was so successful that a few other local freak shows also introduced a male impersonator. He later appeared in the public library as S. B. Matson.

He continued his friendship with Miss Fairweather, but they never did marry. He lost his job and home in the earthquake of 1906. He relocated to Point Lobos. His sex was ‘rediscovered’ when he died of a stroke.

17 June 2010

Woollcott was raised near Red Bank, New Jersey, in a rambling house that had been a utopian community.. His family were avid readers. Alexander was a pampered child whose sisters frequently dressed him as a girl.

At Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, he edited the student literary magazine and founded a dramatic club where he insisted on playing all the female leads. He frequently appeared at parties in female dress, and gave out calling cards that read ‘Alexandra Woollcott’.

He became a drama critic for The New York Times, and was banned by the Shubert Theatre which did not like his reviews. He sued but lost in 1916 on the grounds that the New York Civil Rights Act forbade discrimination on the basis of race, creed or color only. From 1929-34 he had a column in The New Yorker.

He started on CBS radio in 1929 reviewing books, and had a regular show from 1933-8, The Town Crier, where he pushed his own book, While Rome Burns, 1934. He acted a little and co-wrote two Broadway plays. He was a member of the Algonquin Round Table with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. He was a friend of Harpo Marx.

He was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in George Kaufman & Moss Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, filmed 1942, and for Waldo Lydecker in the film Laura, 1944.

Even after achieving fame as a journalist and theatre critic, and becoming fat, he often appeared to his house guests in vast flowing dressing gowns with huge wide-brimmed hats. He also made money designing women's clothing.

15 June 2010

Emil was the second son of Ernst II who gave shelter to Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt. His brother died in 1779, and Emil became Duke (Herzog) of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg from 1804 on the death of his father. Emile August was an admirer of Napoleon, and joined his Duchy to the pro-French Rhine Confederation in 1806.

In 1805 he wrote a poetic novel, Kyllenion - Ein Jahr in Arkadien.Magnus Hirschfelt describes him as 'one of the most opalescent princes of all time'. The composer, Karl Maria von Weber, who was a friend of the duke and dedicated his Second Piano Concerto to him, wrote; 'His appearance has something uncommonly noble about it, and in spite of his high stature, something soft, almost womanly, which also has to do with his preference for women's articles of clothing.'

He was averse to hunting and riding which were expected of men of his class. Several commented on his womanly features and on his wont to appear in female clothing, and to be called Emilie. Hirschfeld mentions a picture of him as a Greek woman with a little lap dog on a sofa in a womanly pose. In 1817, Emile wrote in a letter to a friend: 'I felt much better, and self-love and self-esteem flared up in me more strongly when I shed that miserable, burdensome, and clinging slush of the manliness which has been forced upon me.'

13 June 2010

David Shayler was born in Middlesborough and raised in High Wycombe. He read English at the University of Dundee, where as editor of the student newspaper he published extracts from Peter Wright’s Spycatcher at a time when it was banned in the UK. After graduation he worked as a journalist for 6 months at The Sunday Times, before being fired.

In 1991, he answered an oblique advert in The Observer, which resulted in him joining MI5. By his own account, he worked in vetting Labour Party candidates, then Irish activists, and then on the Libyan desk at a time when MI6 was involved in an attempted assassination of Muammar al-Gaddafi without ministerial approval. Shayler left MI5 in 1996.

In 1997 he claimed that the security knew in advance of the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing and the 1994 bombing of the Israeli embassy. After giving details to the press, he fled to the Netherlands and then France. From August to November 1998 he was held in a French prison until the French courts decided that the UK extradition request was politically motivated and therefore not valid. In August 2000 he voluntarily returned to the UK. He was charged under the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to 6 months in prison, and served seven weeks.

He has announced that he was anointed as the messiah on 2 July 2007. His powers allow him to influence the weather, prevent terror attacks and predict football scores. His ‘channeling of the light’ put Middlesborough Football Club into the UEFA Cup Final.

Recently he has been living in a squat in Surrey. He is now frequently presenting to the world as Dolores Kane, a persona that he had previously kept private, while growing hemp and waiting for the world to end in 2012. He explains that his ‘up-and-at-them’ male energy had to balanced by a strong feminine energy, and Jesus was a transvestite also.

11 June 2010

Born possibly as Hal Wadell in Texarkana, Texas in 1892, or as Ramon Icarez near Chihuahua, Texas in 1898, Ray Bourbon enjoyed embellishing his life story. He claimed that his first lover was the ranch foreman who was subsequently murdered, that Pancho Villa helped his mother at this time, and that he ran guns (in drag) for Pancho Villa, as the mysterious ‘La Senora Diablo’, that he was the illegitimate son of Franz Joseph of Austria and Louisa Bourbon, and that he was a student at the Tulane Medical School in New Orleans.

It does seem that he was in England in 1913 and managed to get small roles in shows in Music Hall. He returned to the US in 1917, and began using the name Ray or Rae Bourbon. He married for the first time, and a son was born in 1918.

Ray may have won a Photoplay contest resulting in work at a Hollywood studio. He had cameos in a variety of silent films, including as the stuntman for Estelle Taylor and a stand in for Clara Bow. He has been identified in some of the Rudolph Valentino pictures, and played an old woman in Pola Negri’s Bella Donna, 1923. As Ramon Icarez he was a ‘fire dancer’ at the opening of the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1923.

In the mid-1920s he was working with Bert Sherry and later toured with the Martin Sisters. By 1932 he was working fulltime as a female impersonator. His performance at Tait’s in San Francisco in 1933 was being broadcast live when the club was raided by the police. He was one of the big names of the Pansy Craze of the last years of Prohibition. He had a small role as a dancer in the film Golddiggers of 1937. He worked at Finocchio’s drag nightclub in San Francisco, and with Mae West in her shows Catherine was Great, 1944, and Diamond Lil, 1948.

After arraignment, 1956 Beverly Hills

In 1956 Rae claimed he had approached Johns Hopkins Hospital to have had a sex change, but was told that it was impossible. He then went to Dr Emerick Szekely, a Hungarian refugee from the Nazis living in Juarez, who had performed the operation. Rae at different times claimed that she had had the operation to avoid cancer, and to avoid local laws against cross-dressing. However he still stood to urinate, and off-stage still lived as man. In a club in West Hollywood in 1956, Rae was billed as ‘not a female impersonator’, and was charged and convicted of impersonating a female.

Rae was also charged with female impersonation in Seattle, El Paso and New Orleans in the next few years. However in Miami she was arrested for impersonating a man.

In the mid-1960s he toured with the Jewel Box Revue. He released dozens of LPs, probably more than any other female impersonator. He toured more than other female impersonators, and for many gay men in the US at that time, Ray Bourbon was the only drag act that they ever saw.

In 1967 his car caught fire in Texas. Rae saved his dogs, and lodged them with Blount’s Pat-A-Zoo. Rae couldn’t pay the bill and A.D. Blount sold them for medical research. Rae was upset by this and wrote to the Governor of Texas and the newspapers about it. In December 1968, two young acquaintances drove Rae’s car to Texas using his money, and, while roughing him up, one of them killed Blount. The two young men were convicted of murder with malice, and Rae, accused of paying the men to kill Blount, was convicted of accomplice to murder. Rae was 75 and in ill health: he had a serious heart attack while awaiting trial. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

He accidentally escaped once when a door was left open, but merely went to sleep around the corner. He obtained a typewriter from his lawyer, and started writing his memoirs. He wrote 300 pages before dying of leukemia complicated by a heart condition.

He was married twice to women, and fathered a son. He had both male and female lovers, and was said to fancy young men, but never referred to himself as gay or bisexual.

George Capozi Jr. ‘Female Impersonator Needn’t Fake Again – Says Surgery Made Him a Her’. New York Journal America. May 28, 1956. On the back of the LP sleeve to Let Me Tell You About My Operation. Online at www.coolcatdaddy.com/bourbon-doc-operat-ja.jpg.

09 June 2010

Mel Michaels was born in Norfolk, Virginia and raised in Harlem, New York. She started performing at age 14. She was a singer and a drag artiste and was in the Jewel Box Revue in the late 1950s, early 1960s. She was the first black star at the 82 Club. She was fired for taking female hormones. ++"One of the owners said to her: "Girls like you are going to be the death of this business".

She performed in Cannes, Marseilles, Paris and Berlin.

From 1974 she has been a resident of Germany. She was in four German films in the 1970s and 1980s: Inspektor Perrak greift ein, 1970, Die Alptraumfrau (Nightmare Woman) 1981, Stadt der Verlorenen Seelen (City of Lost Souls) 1983 and EineHandvoll Vergnügen (Crazy Boys) 1987. ++She completed her womanhood in the mid 1980s.

She ran a nightclub on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn at Spielbudenplatz 27-28 upstairs in Schmidts Tivoli Theatre from 1990, but later had to give it up because of ill-health, although it is still named after her.

She died aged 67.

Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995: 147-8.

05 June 2010

Annadurai was born the son of a owner of a milk delivery lorry in Namakkal, Tamil Nadu, India (map). In love with a fellow male student, he failed his school exams and dropped out. His parents gave him a male job cleaning the lorry. But he was also subject to anti-hijra taunts.

He met other hijra and started growing his hair. His brother beat him almost unconscious with a cricket bat, and then he was dragged to the local temple where his head was shaved.

After three months Revathi started wearing a sari, and went to Delhi where she found a guru with whom she would beg. Then she moved to Mumbai and became a sex worker. After her nirvanam (gender surgery), her family accepted that this what she was doing. In Bangalore she was stripped and beaten for two days in a police station, and then forced to clean the station floor. Her guru, Manjulam, was murdered by extortionists at the age of 58.

As a guru in turn, Revathi often refused a cut of her chela’s earnings. One of her chelas introduced her to the Bangalore-based NGO Sangama. Revathi spoke at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, 2003, where she also married a fellow activist, but he left her a year later because she was not subservient.

With the encouragement of a board member of Sangama, Revathi travelled across Tamil Nadu for a year meeting 37 hijras and documenting their experiences. She organized sexual minority rights rallies, and educated hijra sex workers about their rights.

Since the publication of her book she has been living with her parents, now aged invalids, and is their sole caregiver and financial support. She is working on a project of listing all 3 lakh (3,00,000) hijras in south India to make their community more real. However she was then then forced back into sex work because of a lack of other income. However Penguin Books has commissioned an autobiography, and Sangama has found a position for her in Mysore where she will not need to meet her ex-husband.

She co-founded Transgender Nation in San Francisco in reaction to transphobia in Queer Nation, and as such was part of the 1993 demonstation at the American Psychiatric Association.

Anne was initiated as an hijra in India in 1993, the first westerner to do so. She wrote up her experiences in India in the Transsexual News Telegraph. In 1998 she attempted to arrange for three hijra of the house of Najafgarh to visit California, and Yale University. She also attempted to start a school for hijras in India.

01 June 2010

The front cover of this book says that it is by Violet Grey, but both Amazon and her own publisher, CompletelyNovel, say that the author is Rose White. Rose has also used the pseudonym Fleur Black. There is an obvious pattern here of a flower word with a colour word. Readers of Grey, White and Black will quickly notice that all three have the same stylistic quirks, of which the most obvious is that Grey, White and Black – and nobody else – all write ‘autogyne’ instead of ‘autogynephile’. Here is Rose using it, and here is Fleur. The book quotes White and Black as if they are different persons from the author, assumed to be Grey.

Fleur Black went through a phase of posting comments on Women Born Transsexual in March 2009. Here is a sort of autobiography:

I was crossdressing at 6/7 but by 8 I knew I had to hide it ..until at 14 I wrote to Doctor asking him to cure me to be a proper boy because that's what everyone seemed to think I was and by then my body had gone really male…doctor brought letter to speak to mother, he ran out of house rather than speak to me when I arrived home from school..no-one said anything about it so a couple of days later I swallowed the aspirins and made a mess all over the bathroom…buried it basically but of course we everyone constantly reminded me that I was displaying feminine behaviour..finally at FIFTY SEVEN it was do or die time…now 4.5 years later I hope I’m less than a year off surgery…but if the shrink in April says no SRS then I will have nothing left to live for even though I'm fully out and transitioned all legal right up to just needing SRS so I can try get a bit of a proper life for my last years…my mother is almost 90 and lots of relatives lived into 80s so basically i could have a few good years…just hope so. [a few spellings corrected].

Violet tells almost the same life tale (p2).

Here Rose writes about her trip to Tunisia for breast augmentation. She is active in the Charlotte Goiar HBS group. While she has had her Gender Recognition Certificate for some time, she is encountering difficulties in getting surgery under the NHS. Rose nor Fleur nor Violet say anything at all about what they did between the ages of 14 and 57.

Charlotte Goiar has put a link to the book on the HBS International (English) site, but only to the PayLoadz site where you can pay for it without seeing it. There is no link to the CompletelyNovel site. Nor is it admitted that Violet Grey is Rose White.

Actually, CompletelyNovel give the book's title as Harry Benjamin Syndrome Review, but internally the title is given as Transsexual Phenomenon #2: HBS: Harry Benjamin’s Syndrome comes of age.

While the book is claiming to be a successor to Harry Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon, there are no footnotes, no bibliography and no index. Internal citations to other publications are usually either wrong or inadequate, and she freely replaces ‘transsexual’ with ‘HBS’ in quotations from others without editorial brackets and without clarity that she is doing so. A very serious defect is that the page numbers given on the contents page are plain wrong: e.g Chapter 6 is said to be on p37, but it actually starts on p44.
The first 18 chapter comprise 108 pages, and each make a short point. Chapter 19 alone is another 108 pages, and rambles and rants. I suspect that many readers will skip the last chapter.

Jargon. In addition to ‘HBS’ which is unquestioned here (as you would expect from the book’s two titles), there are other usages which need to be explained. Fortunately she devotes chapter 2 to how she uses some of the words.

She and they say ‘gender’ where most of us would say ‘gender identity’. This is confusing, but this misuse is not confined to HBS persons, and in fact is a usage popularized by Virginia Prince.

‘Mangina’ was a term used by Joseph Kirchner after his return to being male. I have never seen any other person identify with the term. Rose and HBS persons have imposed this term on men who wish for or have acquired a vagina without becoming a woman. They show no interest in the self-chosen terms used by such men.

She and others use BLZB, sometimes expanded to Beelzebub, which means Blanchard, Lawrence, Zucker and Bailey. Rose sometimes writes as if this were one person or one thing.

White-Black-Grey also has some personal usages that need to be spelt out.

As already mentioned, she persistently writes ‘autogyne’ instead of ‘autogynephilic’: “Autogyne (sic) was conjured up by Ray Blanchard, leader of the Beelzebub gang at Toronto’s CAMH” (p13).

She uses the old-fashioned, not to say patronizing, GG=Genuine Girl for cis women, and Norm for cis men.

She often uses HBS, transgender etc as nouns, as against the common opinion that they should be used only as adjectives.

Body Clocking Effect (p16). Rose claims that an HBS woman on estrogen ends up looking 15 years younger, while a lesbian will look like an old man by her fifties.

BRSS=Bindel-Raymond-Stein Syndrome. See below. One can understand Rose putting Bindel and Raymond into this, but who is Stein? It turns out to be Gertrude. I don’t know of Gertrude Stein being transphobic, and Rose does not produce any such evidence.

FBMS=Fourrat-Bailey-McHugh Syndrome. See below.

IPAP=Induced Pheromic Addiction Perversion. See below.

Anne Vitale Effect. She uses this term but does not define it. I used Google to find Rose defining it here: “Effect of rising testo needing feminine expression followed by falling testo causing lack of female thinking and the urge to purge”. See also here where Lilacwoman (presumably Rose again) sends readers to Anee Vitale’s TNote 15.

Natalie-Rose Syndrome. An increased need to urinate as the prostate has shrunk and the bladder is sitting lower.

MBEPR=Malignant Bisexuals’ Ego Protection Reflex.

Bigots and Fools. This is the title of Chapter 10. Enemies are “the Fouratist homo, the public, the press, bigots and fools, ignorant medics, penny pinching political manipulators, BRSS dykes, religious pedophiles, closet homos and … Manginas”. She particularly decries writers Fourat, Bindel, Burchill, Batty and Raymond. You may know who each of these are, but in this book they are simply denounced with no explanation. This is the most homophobic chapter with its obsession about oral sex and wild fantasies of what oral sex does. See more below.

Some of her points:

HBS are not “crossdressers, manginas. transgenders, autogynes, wimps, perverts, genderqueers, genderbenders, drag queens, fetishists, drag kings, transvestites, AIS, Klinfelters, hermaphrodites, male post-ops, female post-ops, non-ops, closet gay, closet lesbians, gays who have ingested too much sperm over the years, lesbians who have ingested too much vaginal secretions, people who have been exposed to unrecognised chemical poisoning at work or in the environment, mental cases” (p24). An HBS, unlike the experts and the transgenders, can tell another HBS from all of the above.

She explains that Harry Benjamin was a researcher in Chicago (p1). She must be better informed than other writers who thought that he worked in New York and San Francisco only.

“We are all descended from Adam and Eve” (p28).

“Manginaism is a new phenomenon engendered by the endless media-porn brainwashing” (p11). In other words it is media-genic; it is taken up by people who have seen it in the media. There are those who say that the increase in transsexuality in general, and therefore HBS also, is media-genic. White-Black-Grey does not discuss this other aspect.

MtF HBS have a second puberty and other trans women do not. “Now that we know about BSTc it is easy to realise that the truly-HBS brain will respond the estrogen regime exactly as does the pubescent girl”. Rose proposes that the MtF HBS will wear “F***-me high heels and pretty clothes and doing their hair like bird’s nests and accessorising as extravagantly as a teenage girl”. For other writers this is precisely the mark of an autogynephile. I agree that starting HRT is like a second puberty, and I remember buying lots of clothes at that stage. But that is a beginning, and most trans women pass though it and then become pretty much like cis women of their own age. (See my review of Janice Raymond where I criticize her for concentrating on the recently transitioned). Rose, by her own account, has been stuck in this phase for 5 or 6 years, and, perhaps defensively, rejects trans women who do not behave like pubertal girls as not being HBS. There is also a chapter on “Why HBS Women Love Shopping”.

The HBS Wikipedia Pages were removed “in the face of an onslaught by cohorts of J Michael Bailey”(Introduction). This will be news to Andrea James who was actively involved in that removal and is also well-known for her antagonism to Bailey and Blanchard.

Rose refers to the well-known 1995 BSTc study by Zhou et al and takes it to be the marker of HBS. “The BSTc findings is the only believable theory of Harry Benjamin Syndrome that makes sense”. She seems to be quite confident that she has a female-sized BSTc, ergo that she is HBS, but does not tell us when her brain was cut open so that it could be established. Also she does not consider, as Anne Lawrence does here, that BSTc is actually a marker for autogynephilia.

Actually Violet does not need BSTc or any brain testing. She has a reliable test for which trans women are truly HBS: “A brain cannot show HBS until post mortem but a good test for true HBSness in the living male is to time how long one can bear to spend in a department store checking out handbags, skirts and bras. Two hours is as good a diagnosis of true transsexualism as any shrink can make; ten minutes or so and he’s just a man.”(p88).

Chapter 6 is a call to action that “We must secede from the DSM”. 'We' being HBS in the EU. In general one can hardly argue with that. The DSM is a product of the American Psychological Association and there is no reason why any other country should use it. She claims that Europe is “practically united in ignoring the DSM and instead interpreting the HBSOC”. Is that the WPATH SOC or the Charlotte Goiar SOC? That is not clear. In the spirit of this secession, Rose then spends most of the rest of the book declaiming against US Americans and Canadians, and says little about the acceptance or otherwise of HBS in Europe.

“Many a homo’s brain has been turned pseudo-female by the testo-to-estro conversion that converts a mouthful of sperm into a dose of estrogen that has given him strange feelings of femininity that are anathema to a homo and which he then compensates for by decrying those male-bodied people who do become happy women” (p70).

Chapter 12 on ‘Induced Pheromic Addiction Perversion’ argues that in Montreal’s (sic) CAMH the person subjected to plesmythography will be affected by the pheromones from Blanchard etc and thus he will be unable to prevent being aroused. This is more so as Blanchard etc are ‘closet homos”.

Chapter 13 is on BRSS=Bindel-Raymond-Stein Syndrome and FBMS=Fourrat-Bailey-McHugh Syndrome. Both of these are “a delusional disassociation showing as an irrational refusal to accept the evidence” that HBS post-operatives go off and lead happy fulfilling lives. While FBMS is “basically simple stupidity”, BRSS is “a dis-ease of the brain in which the estrogen from vaginal sex in ingested and then upsets the body’s chemistry that is stimulated to produce more testosterone to regain equilibrium. But this continued supply of estrogen causes the output of testosterone to then cause a masculinisation of the brain and the body which makes the lesbian feel male and seek more and more vaginas to get the fix of estrogen. Newly lesbian women go though a phase when they resemble nothing more than sex-mad teenage boys. And as everyone knows, appetite grows by what it feeds on, so the BRSS lesbian seeks more and more vaginal sex but the brain has now got to work hard to stop the lesbian seeing herself as a male and so she enters the psychotic denial phase in which she tries to deflect her thoughts from her maleness by targetting what she is becoming and seeking ever more female conquests to prove her lesbianism. Being attracted to visions of femininity the BRSS’d lesbian’s male brain cannot help noticing the HBS women who are going through their own Second Puberty but once the HBS is recognised as such the feeling of revulsion of the possibility of her having any remnant of maleness produces great loathing akin to the homophobia of heterosexual men that naturally outlets as vindictiveness or deliberate sadism like in Bindel’s articles and Raymonds ‘Empire’ or as it is clinically known ‘homosexual rage’. “

Of course there is not the slightest evidence for any of this. It is simply asserted.

She does not comment on what happens to men who do cunnilingus, or to women who swallow sperm.

Conclusions

This is the first book devoted completely to HBS. Hopefully a better, less homophobic one is in the works.

In a later chapter Rose comments about how well she gets on with gays and lesbians in her local LGBT group and criticizes others for being homophobic. This is not an unknown combination. She may be less publicly homophobic than some others but her use of terms like ‘homo’ and her obsession with the ill-effects of oral sex reveal an underlying attitude that is quite nasty.

This book is even more homophobic than the few quotes above might imply. The HBS movement has many times been accused of homophobia. Given this book, any apologist for HBS will need to distance themselves from it, if they are to be taken seriously.

It is a little bit naughty of Rose to pretend to be three people, but it is mild compared to what some academics do.

It will be interesting to see how other HBS persons react to Rose’s book.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.